The present invention relates generally to communications systems and, more particularly, to a packet encoding scheme to provide unequal error protection for different bits.
In a communication system, some of the transmitted information bits require more protection than others (for example, header bits are more important than payload bits, and I-frames are more important compared to P/B-frames in MPEG video streaming). To achieve this, one of the several known techniques can be employed such as forward-error-correction (FEC) applied unequally, packet retransmissions, etc. These techniques may be used to provide unequal error protection for different packets but are not suitable to provide unequal error protection to the bits in one packet.